You know a soup recipe is good when I can overcome its exo-seasonal heat through my sheer demanding curiosity to know what it tastes like. Sure, every time I step outside it feels like I’ve been clamped in a pair of hair straighteners, but I also just had to taste this Shorbat Jarjir, bustling with rocket and spices, from Yasmin Khan’s Palestinian cookbook Zaitoun. It was the rocket itself that lured me in, tangled and peppery, then the warm dusting of spices, then the promise of a satiny puree. I had half-planned to make some dukkah-crusted croutons to accompany it but this soup needed no extra distraction; nor could I be bothered, to be honest. They might have been great, I’m telling myself they weren’t necessary.

As with most of the Palestinian cookbooks I’ve read, Zaitoun is intermittently exhilarating and harrowing, with disarming accounts of loss and oppression between the joyful recipes. In Jerusalem, the author met with a Palestinian nurse who spoke of the rivers of outsiders coming in, researching, interviewing, and then moving on — yes, to showcase the culture and the cuisine — but also to “make your name from writing down our suffering”. A remark that stuck with me as I made this recipe to blog about, and ate it on Waitangi Day while ruminating on the goings-down at Waitangi itself and my own history that stretches out far further than I can see.

So, how am I to sell you on a vegetable soup in the middle of summer? Leaving aside that it might not even be summer where you are, this soup is organza-light after a whirl in the blender and the opaque, blurry green-on-green-on-greenness can’t help but be invigorating with all those vitamins pinging around your system.

Although the ingredients may look simple and wholesome, it’s the pureeing into liquid velvet that concatenates potatoes and greens into the realm of exceptional, with the gentle spices and peppery (that word again, there’s no better way to say it!) rocket and buttery spinach and the torchlight beam of coriander whooshing through it all. Zaitoun was published in 2018 and such is the nature of the treatment of Palestine that there were considerable troubles to reflect upon in this book so many years ago; it remains sadly prescient but filled with beautiful recipes and hope. I always make a song and dance about how I don’t even like soup that much before pledging fealty to another soup recipe, this is a happy addition to that fine tradition.

If you’re after more soup recipes, in order of most to least summer-friendly, I recommend my Chilled Cannellini Bean Soup with Basil Spinach Oil; Tomato and Bread Soup with Fried Carrot Pesto, and my Roasted Garlic Lentil Soup. For more recipes that celebrate Palestine’s culinary richness, you could try Banadora Wa Sumac, M’tabbal Qarae, or this Avocado, Labaneh, and Preserved Lemon Spread.

Shorbat Jarjir | Rocket soup

Despite my complaints about the heat this soup somehow feels just right for summer — it’s so untaxingly silky, so light yet lively in flavour, so calmly delicious. This recipe comes from Zaitoun: Recipes and Stories from the Palestinian Kitchen by Yasmin Khan, and I made it pretty much exactly as she wrote it.

• 1 onion
• 4 garlic cloves
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 teaspoon ground turmeric
• 1/2 teaspoon grated nutmeg
• 1/4 teaspoon ground allspice
• 1 medium-sized potato, around 225g, scrubbed
• 1 litre good chicken stock
• 200g rocket
• 150g spinach
• 30g coriander leaves and stalks
• Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper, to season
• Greek yoghurt and more olive oil, to serve

1: Peel your onion and four garlic cloves and roughly dice the former and crush or chop the latter. It’s all getting blended up later so don’t overthink this part too much. Warm the two tablespoons of olive oil in a wide, deep saucepan and gently saute the onion and garlic until softened but not browned.

2: Tip the spices — 1 teaspoon turmeric, 1/2 teaspoon nutmeg, 1/4 teaspoon ground allspice, plus a little salt and pepper — into the onion mixture and stir to warm through. Roughly dice the potato — leaving the peel on — and drop into the pan, then pour in the litre of stock and simmer for about 10 minutes, or until the potato is stab-soft.

3: Reserve a handful of rocket leaves for serving then tumble in the 150g spinach and the remainder of the 200g rocket, which will look like a preposterous quantity for a moment before melting down into the liquid. Simmer for a while longer till the greens are tender — the recipe said ten minutes, though I found it needed less. I also waited to add the coriander until right before I removed the pan from the heat, so it was only just wilted in the hot liquid. You’re welcome to add it in, stems and all, with the other greens.

4: Carefully transfer the soup into a blender and blitz to a smooth puree (and I do mean be careful — all that heat can build up a lot of pressure under the blender lid.) Or, use a stick blender and puree directly in the pan. Season to taste with the salt and pepper.

Serve scattered with the remaining rocket leaves, swirled with Greek yoghurt and extra olive oil.

Serves 4, although I powered through this easily in two sittings.

Notes:

• Seeing as this is so otherwise vegetable-y, I used Massel vegan chicken stock cubes, and you could use rice, oat, soy or coconut yoghurt to serve it with.
• If you’ve never used coriander stalks before, they’re bursting with flavour — don’t be tempted to leave them out. On the other hand, if you HATE coriander, this still tastes excellent without it, just a bit more muted.
• I imagine it wouldn’t be hard to make this feed more people — chuck in another potato, another bag of greens, about half again more water, up the spices a little, and so on.
• The smooth blended texture really brings it to life, but if you don’t have any kind of blending apparatus this is still lovely as a green-dense soupy stew.
• As you might imagine, this is the kind of forgiving recipe where if you don’t have the exact precise quantities of spinach or rocket it will still come together just fine, bearing in mind the random weights of each green in those little bags at the supermarkets.

music lately:

It had to happen but I still wasn’t ready for Chita Rivera to enter the realm of the past tense, even though she was 91 years old. The original Anita in West Side Story, the sick emotion she pulls into her raucous vocals in A Boy Like That/I Have a Love with Carol Lawrence — in the first few seconds alone — paints an entire world’s worth of visuals, you can shut your eyes and she’s right there, pleading yet scornful.

Heart of Darkness by Pere Ubu, a song that could have come from 2004; these guys are so unafraid to sound wildly annoying that this moody little number is almost too palatable, but I dig it plenty nonetheless.

Save it For Later by The Beat, or The English Beat as they were rather prosaically known in the US, I think this can just about squeeze into the genre I call “songs that keep going” where there’s an ebullient forward propulsion and several different chorus components. Wherever you put it, this is good.